Knight’s Joyce: No Big Asset Sales; Leave High-Speed Trading Alone

Knight Capital isn’t planning on selling anything big and doesn’t think its folly should lead to many industry-wide changes, CEO Thomas Joyce said today.

Bloomberg

In various media interviews while attending a conference, Joyce continued to deal with questions about his firm’s trading error in August that brought the company to its knees and led to an emergency investment from the industry.

According to Reuters, Joyce said Knight Capital’s ongoing review does not include plans to change its business lines.

“An error was made on August 1, but we didn’t really alter our view that we kind of like our footprint. The businesses that we are in, I think are doing well, and at this point we have every intention of building on that success,” he said on the sidelines of a conference held by the Security Traders Association, according to Reuters.

Joyce bristled at the idea that the error at Knight would become a “scapegoat” for leading to industry change.

“We should think about new ways to deal with errors,” Joyce said on the television network, suggesting a circuit breaker on volumes. “Our problem was human error … I wouldn’t jump to a whole lot of new rules because we made an error.”

And Joyce also initially denied, in response to a question from Bloomberg TV, that Knight was losing any top executives to rivals, days after the head of the company’s institutional trading algorithms, Joseph Wald, left.

“We’ve lost a few second and third tier players, who I guess weren’t happy with where they were going in their careers,” Joyce said in the interview. “If somebody who is several layers down … left, god bless them in their new career, but we haven’t lost anybody important to this organization.”

When asked more specifically about Wald’s departure, Joyce said he wished him the best.

Comments (5 of 7)

This and other topics that are relevant for high frequency traders and institutional investors will be discussed at High-Frequency Trading Leaders Forum 2013 London, next Thursday March 21.

10:48 am September 23, 2012

Anonymous wrote :

sec was pressuring them to cover the naked shorts from 2000 to now and they got 3mos reprieves until nite came up with the ultimate solution, naked short the co. stock using their own proprietary algorthymic system off shore of course. no kcg no covering of counterfeit shares in 10,000 companies. anyone long this is a fool.

10:44 am September 23, 2012

Anonymous wrote :

can you say naked short your own stock offshore??
on purpose!!!!!!!!!!!!

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